For all those of you out there who are trying to tackle the ever growing problem of SPAM, here is just another reason to hate it.

Quote:

Lewd e-mail promoting pornography may soon pose more than just a technical challenge in the ongoing fight against spam--experts say it's set to become an acute legal problem, too.

You can find the whole article HERE You may want to pass this along to your legal department.

Cheers:

April 10th, 2003, 04:54 PM

prana0777

I hate SPAM! It s really annony me.Spam people /comany love to send anyone with spam email or junk spam or whatever it is. They will laugh and smell more papers of MONEY!

April 10th, 2003, 05:00 PM

linuxguy99

Yep. My daughter went looking for scholorships on the Internet and forgot not to click "allow us to send you e-mail from selected partners?"

Hmm, I had no idea some of thier strategic partners included hot teen sex and viagra samples.

April 10th, 2003, 05:01 PM

VanEck

It would definitely be nice to be able to hold these people liable for their spam. It is seriously rediculous. It seems that every day it is getting worse and worse. It doesn't matter how old you are these days. If you have an email account, the chances are that you have received some obscene and unsolicited email. SPAM is corrupting our youth!

Another thing that can be annoying is SPAM via the fax machine. Here at the office, we receive SPAM related fax's quite often. For the longest time, I thought there was nothing that could really be done about as far as the law is concerned. This is untrue... I have recently discovered that there is an actual law against sending unsolicited data over a fax and can be considred harassment. If you tell the solicter to cease from spamming you and he continues to do it, you may have a case on your hands =)

April 10th, 2003, 05:16 PM

tonybradley

Spam is getting to be a more and more serious issue for my customer and we are looking at a couple of options for trying to stem the tide.

I am sure that more companies will take this annoyance more seriously if they start getting sexual harrassment suits from their employees. But, I also think that more needs to be done by the government and law enforcement to hunt down and prosecute the purveyors of the spam in the first place.

April 10th, 2003, 06:12 PM

DjM

Quote:

Originally posted here by tonybradley Spam is getting to be a more and more serious issue for my customer and we are looking at a couple of options for trying to stem the tide.

tony, if one of the options you are thinking about is the use of "blacklists", I would strongly recommend you reconsider. Two of the more popular blacklist sites are MAPS & Spamcop. Now when you visit their websites you are greeted with info. such as:

Spamcop - This blocking list is somewhat experimental and should not be used in a production environment where legitimate email must be delivered. It is growing more stable and is used by many large sites now. However, SpamCop is aggressive and often errs on the side of blocking mail

Now comments such as this don't really give me the warm & fuzzies that this is a direction I want to go.

Cheers:

April 10th, 2003, 07:21 PM

amazingzarkon

I don't know what the solution is. I also don't know anyone in the business who isn't trying to stem the spam tide at this point.

I am holding out some hope that the Anti Spam Research Group (ASRG) that has been formed by the IETF to look into the issue will make some progress. Still I think the problem is going to continue to get worse before it gets better.Check out the ASRG charter...

The two technologies I see employed are based on blacklists/whitelists or scanning content or a combination of these two approaches. Neither mechanism is foolproof and everything I've seen to date requires a relatively high amount of administrative involvement to manually weed through what is getting blocked to make sure valid emails aren't being filtered.

This still doesn't do anything to deal with the fact that we're still forced to deal with the mail after it crosses the router and hits our wire. This means we're paying for the bandwidth that is being consumed by the spam. It sure would be nice to get some mechanism to block or prevent it upstream before it hits our link from the ISP.

Someone must actually be purchasing crap that is solicited in spam - if there was no money coming in, it wouldn't be so prevalent.

If anyone has any good solution (other than hunting down the spam-sending scum like the worthless filth that they are) please please please let me in on the secret.

April 11th, 2003, 03:54 AM

khanacarm

With most mailing services, it is best to create a safelist of all of the websites that you will most likely recieve mail from in addition to public mailing sites such as MSN, Hotmail, AOL, BellSouth, Juno, Yahoo... For the first few months, you should search your junk mail folder twice per week for messages that you want to recieve, and add that particular address or server to the safelist. If you recieve unwanted and unsolicited junk mail from a public mailing site, such as AOL, you should find the address and turn it over to the administration of that site. They will often deactivate the account.